Mochi Madness

I’ve been on an Asian food kick lately, and mochi ice cream is my new obsession. I think they’re tasty, adorable, and fun to eat. I’ve seen the videos of traditional mochi being made with the two guys pounding the crap out of rice to create a sticky dough risking their hands and heads in the process. It’s amazing what they do. Naturally, I wasn’t going to make mochi that way. So I got on the inter webs and found a simple enough recipe to follow. WARNING: no recipe coming at the end of this (maybe in the future, but not today).

I don’t want to say it was a total bust, but I didn’t exactly succeed. Let me start off by saying, baking is not my forte. So, I found a recipe for chocolate mochi and followed it step by step. I froze my ice cream and red bean paste (because I really like red bean paste in my ice cream and decided to make red bean ice cream and chocolate mochi), I measured and mixed the ingredients according to the recipe and things were going well. I cooked the mochi per the instructions and let it cool. I coated a piece of parchment paper with starch, and dumped the gooey dough out. I sprinkled starch all over that and rolled it out. Things were still going well up till this point.

I ran out of room on my parchment and needed to keep rolling because it was way too thick. Here’s where I went really wrong. I listened to my sister. She suggested I just cut it and re-roll the one half out later. That was a big fat bad idea. The mochi dough had not absorbed any of the starch underneath like it did on top. None. That gooey dough got ALL OVER my hands, almost ruined the knife and didn’t actually come up off the parchment paper. Realizing this was a bad idea, I did my best to clean my hands and then get some starch to stick to the bottom. I then stuck the mochi in the fridge for about half an hour to let it harden a little.

Once I pulled out the dough from the fridge it was SLIGHTLY easier to work with. I was able to roll it out, cut it and get it off the parchment (wasn’t pretty though). Good enough. I pulled out my ice cream and red bean balls and wrapped them as best I could in the mochi and set them in the freezer for a few hours.

Here’s why I don’t want to say it was a total bust: the mochi actually tasted really delicious–in my opinion. If you like red bean paste and don’t mind the weird combo of sticky and starchy that the mochi is, you might enjoy what the end result was. My mom really liked it, and she’s usually pretty honest about what I feed her. In the future I will probably try to make mochi again, but as of right now, my mochi-making skills need some work.